going from $6k down to $3k had nothing to do with "taking profit", it was purely based on manipulation and panic because of the bcash fork FUD attack and the market was ready at that point to either see a launch or a panic sell wave like this.
the thing about drops is that the lower we go, the bigger a drama/FUD we need. and there is no more FUD remaining that can have any kind of significant effect on the price.

if the puzzle is actually solvable then it should not take "years" to solve it and so far all the puzzles that are being created are either unsolvable which means they will remain like that unless the creator moves the funds himself or are being solved in less than a month.

the only case where the puzzle was solved years later was when the puzzle was created back when price was very low so there was no incentive to bother solving it at the time (imagine a puzzle with 100 satoshi today!) but with price rise it became valuable so people started working on it and solved it.

i am wondering whether the actions like this are going to open up some sort of competition. like any other business, banks are also competing with each other so when one big one rejects a certain group of businesses it can open up room for others to pick them up and increase their own revenues. it would be interesting to see how this changes in the future too, as bitcoin grows and more and more businesses start up.

depending on how many time you want to access your bitcoin you can make an easier choice in my opinion. for example if you want to store your bitcoin and not touch it for years then using a paper wallet is the cheapest and best way to go. but if you want to constantly access them (like a trader wanting cold storage) then using a hardware wallet is best and if you don't want to pay then setting up a wallet on an offline machine is the way to go. my set up is on a linux installed on a USB disk with network cut off and Electrum installed with multiple encryption.

just give different setups a try and see which one works best for you.

1. is not even a thing let alone be important. first of all there is nothing wrong with having ASICs and being able to use them, secondly there is no such thing as "Anti-ASIC", some coins fooled their users by this "buzzword" but in reality they are "Anti-bitcoin-specific-ASIC" in other words you can use ASIC to mine them but not bitcoin's ASICs.
2. as long as this is not a weaker algorithm, it can be good but i wouldn't put it on the top of the list. it belongs down.
3. not mandatory.
4&5. these can be added as second layer to most coins so not so much important. not to mention that things like "cross chain" are only useful for traders!
6. so far i have no seen any usage for smart contracts although the idea seems good. so i'll say not important

7+. being Decentralized, boarderless, permissionless, immutable, secure

entry price is only one part of making profit. there still is a lot of other things to consider before being able to make good profit from an investment. for example consider the case of 2017 rise. the lowest price was around $1000 at the start of the year and one could technically enter there but making profit depended solely on the decisions that the investor made after that. for example there were many who panicked and sold their coins as price went back down a little in correction. so in their cases despite entering at a low price, they lost money.

when you download from a website that doesn't have SSL encryption then what you explained is possible. but not when they have that encryption (meaning a link starting with https such as https://electrum.org/#download

additionally it should not matter as long as you are verifying the signature of the files you download. for example in case of Electrum you must verify whether the downloaded binaries were signed with the developer's key (0x6694D8DE7BE8EE5631BED9502BD5824B7F9470E6) using PGP. there is no way to fake that.

not really!
Satoshi meant bitcoin to be a decentralized permissionless currency and that means anybody can use it, and Coinbase is among those "anybody"s. they are offering certain type of services that can have their own usages and as long as people don't have any illusions about what they really are (a centralized account that controls your bitcoin and tracks you and reports your every move) i don't see any problem with their services.

actually it is more like saying you love the internet but tell people if they invest in Google their money will be lost as Google is going to crash and burn. because that is exactly what he has been doing when every time he says things along the lines of bitcoin is a delusion and is not going to end well.

i sometimes get worried about what has happened to this community. it seems like majority of people are newbies with their heads in the sand!

the only thing that this news tells me is that all these people who are these days over excited and are closing their coinbase accounts are newbies who had no idea what they were and are doing. nothing has changed about Coinbase, the only thing that has changed is a social media drama campaign that is hyping them up to follow it like a sheep!

when you use Coinbase which a US based centralized service with a history of reporting every single move of their customer to multiple 3 letter agencies you really can't be surprised when they expand their services to other things like blockchain analysis and acquire teams like those hackers,...
your surprise is like jumping in a pool and then being surprised about why you got wet!!!

whenever it comes to anonymity of bitcoin and methods that you want to choose from the real question is "Who are you trying to hide from?" because depending on that your options can be limited to one or two or it can be limited to a couple of dozens.
converting bitcoin to monero and back can increase the anonymity by a lot but again the same question rises. because some normal user who is not running from the law is not going to be de-anonymized by any services but if for example someone is already running from the FBI and is under observation or has some stolen bitcoins then no matter what he does, there still is going to be a way of finding him.

i hope now you realize that bitcoin is not just about security, the main characteristics of bitcoin that makes it better than all of these other options is its decentralization. otherwise all these methods of payment can technically become just as secure as bitcoin with some effort but they still will remain centralized and it is always going to be the bank that controls your money and allows you to spend it and can decide not to do it some day...

when the rise starts there will be an inflow of money to the market which would easily absorb any sells, just like any other previous times that we had the same trend. initially price hits the bottom and becomes stable for a while where everyone accumulates. then we see these small rises towards the resistances ($4.1k in this case) and then it eventually breaks and by that time no matter how much people sell, it won't slow down.

you might want to include the Puzzle that you are trying to use others to solve!
currently there are a couple of them out there and most of them are not even worth the time and i know of at least one that is not even solvable (the puzzle looks more like trolling than an actual puzzle). people don't want to waste their time on things that aren't worth it like that.

you are looking for something that allows you to convert bitcoin to fiat and transfer it to bank and because of that last part it is impossible to find some service that is both trusted and doesn't require identity verification. that simply doesn't exist.
the only option i can think of is Coinbase. although i would suggest paying them directly with fiat since they have no idea what bitcoin is and want fiat right away!

i don't remember seeing him praise anything but it would be understandable if he did since most of these people have some sort of stake in centralization so they praise the technology mainly when it is adopted by the centralized sector (like banks, example: Jpmorgan)

then why are you quoting him here and starting a TOPIC about him?!!

if some company could afford the equipment, electricity  and other costs, had the space,... then they wouldn't have been selling the hashrate to others in small increments for peanuts. instead they would have mined themselves and enjoyed the whole profit! something has to be wrong with their plans that they have to sell it like this...

"normal SegWit" is Bech32 addresses that start with bc1, which is also known as native SegWit address format. everything else is just a workaround to stay compatible with services that haven't upgraded their system to support the new additions to bitcoin yet.
and Electrum supports all of them, you just have to take extra steps if you want to use a non-default wallet type (aka nested SegWit ie. addresses starting with 3).

fun fact: address posted by OP seems to be a multi signature one!

theoretically it has to be because in order to perform a 51% attack you have to spend a lot of money and take a lot of risks. and owning that much hashrate you are normally finding more than half of the blocks and that is more than $3.5 million per day with current price. so to pull it off the profit has to be higher than that at least to be worth the effort.
of course there can be other motivations such as government shenanigans but that is a different conspiracy theory!

those cases were too small and they were performed anonymously because you really didn't need that much hashing power to pull something like that. here in bitcoin world we are talking about a known company and if they perform a 51% attack it would be easy to detect and prove who did it! and again we are talking about millions of dollars, and that is not something you could sweep under the rug that easily.